Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s $1 billion federal subsidy scheme for solar panel makers on the site of a closed coal-fired power station in the NSW Hunter Valley is just what gives industry policy a bad name.

This new green protectionism comes wrapped in talk about building strategic supply chains in a more dangerous world. Yet, of all the things to throw other people’s money at, why choose one where the world’s two biggest manufacturing behemoths in China and the US are going head to head in a green supply chain subsidy war guaranteed to distort markets and destroy competition?